Great question. Take legal for example. I spend a lot of my time working with lawyers in countries where we are setting up a vehicle / working with a client bu

Great question. Take legal for example. I spend a lot of my time working with lawyers in countries where we are setting up a vehicle / working with a client but where I am not domiciled and IANAL in any country! I decide with our management team what kind of legal structure we want, the terms, the carve-outs, the financials etc and I draft layperson's language based on that. Our (external) legal team will turn that into a 60-100 page document that is compliant with the laws of the territory in question. I will review that in excruciating detail, look for errors, edit and iterate many times until the document is good for our purposes. This really means going through every kind of scenario (defaults, bankruptcies, early termination for any reason, loss of key personnel etc etc) to make sure nothing will bite us in the butt down the road. Once the vehicle is launched, it is my job to make sure that the financial vehicle follows the rules laid out in the legal document on a day-to-day basis. By this stage, I know every clause in that legal document, usually better than the drafting lawyers because I'm the one that "lives" with the document. I can do all of that without being a lawyer or being knowledgable about the specific laws of the territory where the vehicle is based (which is not necessarily where I am domiciled) because other people bring that local knowledge to the table. So .. while as a firm we hire outside counsel to perform our legal work, it is far from outsourced. I am heavily involved with my business knowledge and prior experience with legal documents (learned on the job), and the lawyers have their legal knowledge, prior precedence and all-important templates. And we marry the two to craft and manage our legal agreements and vehicles. I am confident I could apply that skill in any country with similar legal foundations to the US. To be clear, I cannot think of any scenario where you would allow a non-lawyer generalist to operate without external counsel.